


Might Have Known This Would Hurt

by 13letters



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, everything I write turns immeasurably sad, of sadness and joy and hurt so cutting, seasons 2 and 3, this follows the show more closely than the books
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 23:50:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11520135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13letters/pseuds/13letters
Summary: If only.





	Might Have Known This Would Hurt

They first meet, and she's half his size. She's everything tiny and fierce and bitter and angry and _angry_ \-- so much so that her tears run hot and hurt and wet and quiet that first night.

But he's angry, too, as they walk and then run from the gold cloaks, from their pasts, from the history that's repetitive and ironic. He's so angry that he _shakes_ and feels the rage tense in his shoulders, lock in his jaw. _Ours is the fury_ is how it goes, but they first meet, and he might already know she'll kill him, one day.

A love story where he's sure to die by her perfect hands. A love story that will soon be a song scripted in _if only_.

.

Outside Harrenhal, there were the screams and the cries of girls she might continue to hear forever.

While she couldn't guess exactly what those men did to the women and girls they found, she knew enough, but everyone else knew better than to try to stop the men.

It's when one drunk man in leather armor looks at her too closely and decides she's rather pretty for a boy that something has his heart quit breathing. It's the gods alone who make it so that same man is called over by someone else to help hold a woman from the next village down, and Gendry. He knows this could last all night.

He pulls Arya down a few yards away, makes sure that with the cover of this tree and the blanket of nightfall, no one can see her tucked against his chest.

"Don't let them," he's not even sure she realizes she's saying. "Please don't let them do that to me." She's begun to start shaking, has her hands clamped over her ears and her eyes closed so tight -- that woman is _screaming_ , men are laughing -- the faintest register of her small, soft voice crying the word _please_ against his chest.

It breaks his damned heart.

"I won't," he swears. "I promise I won't."

They just know it can't be his promise to give.

.

The boy works in the kitchens with Hot Pie, might be a little younger than Gendry, might not be.

He says, "Why you're a sweet thing, aren't you?" like where he's from on some barley farm, girls in his town just swoon and giggle.

Arya's here to see Gendry, he knows. None else might know how to hurt the other like they do, but no one else knows how to solder their disparate, fractured pieces back together, either.

She doesn't get much time away from acting as cupbearer to the Lord. But that she chooses to spend her time here, with him.

This Darnell fellow can go bugger off.

"Right," Arya says, since she doesn't quite understand what this boy might intend. "When's the last you ate, Gendry?"

"I will after my work's done," he answers.

He means for her not to worry. He means he knows for painful fact he can go a week without eating, but her, Her Highness, was already thin but her waist gets smaller and more frail each day they're here. He means, _don't feel bad about eating my share. You need it more, m'Lady_ , as she licks the juice from the meat from her fingers.

Not quite believing him, she tears the chunk of bread in half next and holds part out to him.

He wipes the sweat from his brow, wipes his hand on his jerkin, and remains otherwise motionless.

Her hunger wins out as he knew it would. She's devouring it in seconds, and Darnell gazes at her like she's this otherworldly thing.

"You've got a nice shape for eating so monstrously," he notes like he's approving it. To emphasize the fact, though, he reaches for Arya's waist and her eyes flash. No sooner has he touched her than has Gendry knocked his fist into the boy's teeth.

"You forget yourself, bastard!" he accuses, holding his hand up to his already bruising jaw.

Gendry just shrugs, doesn't look at either of them. "You put your hand where it doesn't belong. Why shouldn't I?"

.

"Do you regret it yet?" she whispers. It's quiet aside from Hot Pie's snoring, aside from the howling of wolves she swears she hears.

Aside from how loud his thoughts must be, panic and fear and worry, if they're found. If anyone knows they've escaped. "Regret what?"

"Leaving with me." Her voice is this terrified but resigned thing.

She's trying to brace herself, he realizes. He realizes that he's foolish, since when he remembers her cleverness or her sighs or the way he made her laugh mere hours ago, he can't regret any of it at all. "No."

.

"Does it bother you?" she wonders. Just, to prove how much she doesn't care, she doesn't look at him, doesn't bother to slow her stride. "That they call you a bastard?"

"Does it bother you that you're a princess now?" he asks back. To prove how much she should annoy him, he does stop, gives her enough reason to face him and glower since he's slowing them down.

His best imitation of a proper bow is also his poorest, and it is with some resentment that he calls her _Your Highness_ instead of _m'Lady_.

It's only just a sad truth that only one of their titles is true. Sadder still that they both know it yet she won't say it -- she's royalty just as much as he is, and Robb, he's. He's only a little boy playing King, a child at war, and leagues upon leagues away, Arya thinks she's the only one who understands it might be alright for him to fail.

He's just a boy. What do they expect? What can they think will truly help him?

This war is the same as all wars, but what's a bastard against all the Seven Kingdoms?

"There's your answer, then," he notes, taking in her frown with his teeth grit, "Your Highness."

.

What they learn, since they have no one else but Hot Pie complaining that he's hungry, that his feet hurt, that he's tired.

Is that no one else alive can hurt Gendry like she can.

But no one else alive can hurt Arya like he can; it's worse enough when he says the things he means because he feels irrelevant and unnecessary and unworthy.

Her title mocked with a scowl because he never lets himself forget it. Her calling him _stupid_ and dull and boring when he ever tries to talk to her, tries to perhaps get to know her.

But the things they don't mean but say anyways are worse. They're gutting and they're cruel and unapologetic, and the first he makes her cry.

With her back to him and her sobs wracking and quiet and hurt. He pretends not to hear just how he's broken just a bit of her when out of selfish anger and mean frustration, he snarled out the words _you're never going to get back home_.

.

She calls him _bastard_ , and it is a cruel joke. He could have a hand or cock cut off for touching a highborn girl, but when she beats at his chest with her tiny fists, punches at his solid, immovable ribs with so much ferocity it isn't fair he doesn't even sway.

It could mean her death to strike the future king.

When he falls to the ground too determinedly to be by her hands, all an actor's theatrics and a guilty man's remorse, she knows it's for her. Only somehow, it makes her feel even worse.

She doesn't help him up.

He doesn't speak of her grief again.

.

"What?" he quips dryly, pulling at the laces of his shirt. "Going to watch?"

"What are you doing?" she accuses instead. Because it's easier to overreact in aggravation when she doesn't know what else she's feeling.

He pulls his tunic off, and gods, she feels her face go red. She thinks she's a child's petty anger but it becoming a woman's wrath, too, a woman who -- who looks away too slowly.

When he gestures for a tree, all these muscles ripple in his arms, and it's utterly ridiculous. How strong he looks with his hands on the laces of his breeches. How his abdomen --

She swallows.

"You can move behind that tree, m'Lady," he says. "I have to bathe. Do you know how long it's been?"

"I can guess," she stays stoically enough, crinkling her nose at him. "You _stink_."

He heads for the river after a too-long pause. She's still flustered as she leans back into the tree, doesn't turn to see him despite any instinct. She's glad for the sanctuary when she feels just how warm her cheeks have gotten.

.

"Arya," he gasps. Almost like he's reverent, but almost like he's wished he's addressed her by title instead.

"Yes?" she asks him hesitantly. She can just make out his eyes blue in the moonlight.

"Nothing," he decides, shaking his head.

She doesn't say that he's stupid. He's becoming less and less so, and proximity is changing to a reverent thing, less a chasm, more a ladder.

.

Her mother used to ease her mind towards marriage by telling her tales of gallant, heroic knights and charming, honorable good lords who would be handsome and polite and loyal.

Sansa would laugh and blush to imagine it, but Arya merely wanted to be one of those knights. She didn't necessarily mean to marry one of them.

But Gendry with his jaw like an anvil, his rough hands that are so gentle when he helps her over unsteady terrain despite her not needing it. She thinks her father might have liked him.

She thinks Robb certainly will, so she thinks if Gendry would stay in Riverrun with her so he might make swords for the army --

She can understand why he wants to stay with the Brotherhood. She isn't that selfish as to not.

They were free and then captives to the Watch, to Harrenhal, to the Brotherhood Without Banners and to themselves -- prisons are often flesh -- so that he thinks he can become a knight. That she thinks: _fine_. Good riddance; she's never hated him, not really, but she _did_ with so much conviction it chiseled her heart. She might have even loved him someday, but only if they had more years together instead of this continental graveyard impending.

She thinks it's in his best interest to stay, mayhaps, but she won't ever admit it. She meant, he could have stayed with her family, stayed with Robb in battle to a free life and a good existence. She meant, he can't leave her now after all of this, yet maybe she should have expected it. Her life has been an example in abandonment from the start.

.

She never wanted to believe she was right. She can fight others well enough, but battling her own doubt, wrestling with her own conscience, struggling to lift the world in one hand and her own flesh, beating heart in the other against all reason.

She didn't want to be alone.

The last she saw him, she didn't think it would be the last time. Never did she imagine she'd be wrong, that all tales in the end are stories, that after all these lives they might have lived. She still ends up walking alone.

Her own decision, and the pain in it might kill him like figuratively, she would if he was less deserving, if after all this, they dared to think they could almost make it, _if only_.

A life told in hurt and _almost_.


End file.
